The her book project

project | PRINCETON UNIVERSITY LIBRARY | November 2018 - Present

The Her Book Project at Princeton University is an inventory women’s ownership markings found within special collections material collected in an effort to promote the study of gendered patterns of book ownership at Princeton and afar.

The data generated will speak to important questions, including: What are the social, racial and economic profiles of the women represented by this sample size? How many names within these demographics can be identified in the record at all? Which of them have been cataloged? How does the rate of cataloging female names compare to that of their male counterparts? How many women marked ownership via bookplates and how many via inscription? 

By approaching these questions, the Her Book Project aims to facilitate a greater understanding of historic female book ownership on a larger, more comprehensive scale than before. Through this effort, this project intends to correct current trends and test assumptions in the field of annotation studies. In addressing and confronting bias in cataloging practice, the Her Book Project also hopes to contribute to the growing field of critical librarianship.

Initially, the dataset generated will be used to update the Princeton University catalog “former owner” field to include previously undocumented inscriptions. Future and ideal application of the dataset would be to create an online, public database of all women’s markings at Princeton, with the ability for other institutions to contribute their own. 

It is a hope that by making this data more freely and publicly available, this project will also facilitate the recovery of women’s book collections dispersed across various repositories and raise questions about the history of collecting collections in addition to ownership habits.

The first phase of the project focuses on the 4,000 English-language books printed between the fourteenth and twentieth centuries that comprise the Robert H. Taylor Collection of Literature. Based on this initial investigation, a workflow and datastructure were established wherein volumes were assessed one by one and all relevant markings (male, female, non-binary and ambiguous) photographed. Those photographs were then assigned names reflecting their call numbers and digitally sorted into folders for each gendered category. Markings immediately identifiable as those belonging to a woman (ie those with traditionally female names or those determined to belong to a woman via secondary sources), were added to a spreadsheet detailing all identifying bibliographic information. The spreadsheet also documents if the marking is an inscription or a bookplate; if it is for a family or a woman alone; is identifiable as a gift and if so, who the gift is from; the date of the inscription; and if the ownership appears in the catalog. 

Research assistant Nicole Gomez (Princeton class of 2022) is currently working on finalizing phase one’s dataset, which we look forward to sharing in late spring 2021.

The next phase of the project will apply this structure and model to other areas of Princeton Special Collections. Of particular interest is the Holden collection and the Beach Collection, which, as collections created by women, will offer an interesting counterpoint to the dataset generated by the Taylor collection, one created by a man. This next phase intends to correct any inherent bias in the initial dataset while expanding the dataset.

A paper regarding the methodology, findings and prospects for the first phase of the Her Book Project has been accepted for presentation at SHARP 2020 in Amsterdam (Canceled due to COVID-19).

UDPATES & MORE

May 2020: The Her Book Project was awarded a Princeton Center for the Digital Humanities Seed Grant to help support the next phase of the project!

March 2021: “Yours, mine, and hers: Her Book project identifies missing female book ownership in PUL collections” article about the project by Brandon Johnson for Princeton University Library News